FREE LOVE LETTERS

Love letter # 717

And so it has come to this. The bridge that will not be crossed. The line that separates the wishing from the will not be. Yet although I have been here so many times before, I too am rent as though by newly inflicted wounds. For I know so well your side of the line. I know it like the memory of knives. Like blood pouring out so hard and dreadful you want to let it run to the very end. Till everything is washed away. That I should now be the carver of such cuts will surely set those ancient floods in motion once more.

Of course I did not mean this. Of course I hoped we might not arrive at this awful precipice. I felt so good in your presence, so seen by you, that I wanted it continue. Perhaps this was foolish. Selfish. It did not seem so at the time – but I concede that it may have proven so.

Yet for all that, here we are. With the brute animal fact before us. That for all of our absurd posturing, our dressing it up, our pretending we are somehow something other than what we are, desire is not a polite and constructed destination but an ocean far deeper than any philosophy we might dream of or insight we might proclaim. The river is made of blood. The castle built from bone. And dreams are made of skin. So easily torn.

I too have looked at another and wondered. How? What? Why the fuck not? Like you, I have scratched at the hard surface of love and rejection and found no satisfactory answers. Because there are no answers. No logical or ethical reasons. No conscious criteria.

So I will not insult you with a bogus explanation or political apology. You feel the way you feel and I feel the way I feel. Sure, we might try to conjure up nice, middle class theories about this but in the end they are all a denial. A way to paper over what we all fear. That sex, that desire, even love itself spring from wells we cannot control with neatly packaged ideas or the vanity of our so-called enlightenment. That in their narcotic thrall each of us shall surely fall.

I am in pain today but I know that yours is hotter. Darker. Perhaps full of fury. I have stood many times at that gate, waiting and hoping, trying one more time, turning over one more stone. Because of this I know that there can be no consolation prize. No quietly suffering nearness. If I were you I would be doing exactly the same right now.

Au revoir, my friend. I know there is nothing I can say, so I will say nothing more.